Flash on the Bea.. I mean Reasons to be creative

September 4th, 2012 by Slav

I’ve been going to Flash on the Beach conference for something like 5 years now, and at the end of last year’s, John Davey, who is the main organiser announced that Flash on the beach is over. In retrospect that was quite a remarkable foresight of the things to come. By things to come I of course mean slow choke grip of death from beyond the grave of a certain CEO of fruit related company. So as it is in life, when something old dies something new begins.

The new thing being “Reasons to be Creative” conference. Can’t imagine the brainstorming process for this title, but probably identical to one that came up with the : “Snakes on the plane”.

So .. how does it differ from Flash on the Beach?

Most noticeable difference, is probably, there’s much less Flash. In previous years you’d have maybe 70%-75% flash related sessions, now maybe 15-25? Now the focus is more on general creative work. This translates mostly to design, but also to wider aspects of creative work.

Creative Sunday workshops were dropped.. Not sure why is this, perhaps money is reason behind this, but for me this was a bit of a letdown. John could have asked previous attendees via email if they are interested in workshop and what topic do they want to learn about.. There are any hot topic besides the flash that I’d gladly learn about: Haxe and MNE, javascript frameworks, Unity3D.. well.. maybe next year!

Another difference was absence of Adobe. No Adobe keynote speakers, no Lee and other evangelists, no asking Adobe panel to fix flash IDE this year. They were still listed as one of the top sponsors BUT.. no presence.

There was another presence though. All the way from the Dark Side. Little known small company by the name of Microsoft. They came bearing gifts i.e. Atari Games t-shirts, and a competition to be be won by playing Asteroids. First prize : Cool Acer laptop. Ado-who?

Number of attendees dropped as well. Not by too much , max perhaps close to 10 percent. This is only a subjective estimate when looking at the Dome sessions.. to me there were fewer empty seats in the previous years. This is of course understandable , giving the decline of the flash coupled with recent economic downturns. Companies are trying to save money where they can and tickets to this event aren’t exactly very cheap..

At this point I don’t think I can say whether the r2bCreative is better or worse than FOTB. All I can say with certainty that it is different.

Today, I went to the beach front with my kids.
I found a sea shell and gave it to my 4 year old daughter and said “You can hear the ocean if you put this to your ear.” She put the shell to her
ear and screamed. There was a hermit crab inside and it pinched her ear.

She never wants to go back! LoL I know this is entirely
off topic but I had to tell someone!